An illustration of what I was talking about this morning didn’t fail to appear. A Liberal blogger wrote an extremely mildly worded post that questioned whether the concept of trigger warnings was necessarily entirely always completely useful and asking students maybe, possibly, if they would be so kind as to consider maybe possibly doing the kindness of accepting that professors don’t always object to administration – mandated trigger warnings because of being horrible evildoers. Maybe. Possibly. Or not.
The post sounded even more tentative and apologetic than my retelling. Still, it departed by a hair’s breadth from the dogma that trigger warnings are good. As a result, the post’s author got terrified of his own enormous daring and deleted the post.
This kind of thing happens all the time. The moment Bernie Sanders began his campaign, the very Liberals whose interests he was trying to promote descended on him like a flock of angry crows for not using the exact PC terminology of today back in the blethering 1970s. This is not even about censoring ideas. It’s complete intolerance for anything that departs from rigid formulations that have to be reproduced photographically. And of course, the politicians who try to appeal to this audience sound like broken records.
I found this post:
Identity, PTSD, and Trigger Warnings
https://itself.wordpress.com/2015/11/29/identity-ptsd-and-trigger-warnings/
\ the agency and responsibility of the subject is being undermined with the PTSD-model of subjectivity.
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The article you link is a great example of the dogma. The last paragraph has been independently reproduced by so many people that I feel like I know it by heart at this point. It’s this, always this, and some more of this. The tiniest departure is seen as terrifying.
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As good a place to mention this as any (link at bottom).
Honestly, it seems like the entire US is undergoing forced regression to childhood, retreating to a place where important elders take care of the scary things and keep the infantilized americans safe….
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2015/12/isis_s_online_radicalization_efforts_present_an_unprecedented_danger.html
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The article you link is honestly scary. I find it unbelievable that anybody would seriously say these things. In the age of Snapchat, who needs outdated concepts like freedom of speech? What? Internet is making people do things? That’s insane! We need to be protected from the Internet? I practically live online, and it hasn’t made me do anything.
You are right, this is extreme infantilization that I find scary.
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